It is more relevant now than ever, when techno-pessimism is on the rise, and people are forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real - and could guarantee the lives of billions in the future.
I'm in my 30s and probably won't live to see this future. I only hope cryonics can get me there, but I doubt it - so much information is lost.
Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.
If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists.
Edit: „The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“ can be read at https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
The fact you talk about cryonics instantly reveals your worldview. I'm sorry to say, but I firmly believe you're mistaken.
Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.
> to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible
Arguably a stepping stone to better technologies, and a prerequisite to machine intelligence
I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothing like this! Again: mass surveillance, predatory pricing, mass manipulation, fake videos, line-rate slop: this is what big tech proposes, not the cure for cancer or the 15-hour workweek.
Also a nit: infant mortality was dreadful and pushed avg life expectancy way down. But if you lived to 15 you had a good chance of living to 70 even in pre-modern times.
The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments.
This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows.
I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".
Over the past ~12 months I've become increasingly convinced that LLMs are a net negative for society. It's so intensely disheartening to see them eating the entire industry.
Technology is not the only path towards expansion of consciousness, even though in this day and age, it appears so. The wonders, marvels, and growth described in this story can be experienced through other means. To act and build as if it is the only path is, in my opinion, deeply misguided.
Probably not the most popular stance in this crowd.
Part of the magic of this story is that it can change what you agree with (as it did for me.) Not saying it will do the same for you, but it is a compelling vision; I can't think of other ways to get there without getting unscientific.
The analogy is not correct. I know that burger is rich in taste and marvelous. It is also my opinion that it is an illusion, and lacks substance.
There is so much more to the cosmos than science, though I get that this is the current preoccupation of our civilization. Maybe one day, people will expand their consciousness beyond science the way the main character expanded her’s to communicate with aliens. Until then, I recognize I am in the minority here in HN with this view.
Sure, let's say the author does use NLP. What of it?
Rhetoric and persuation has long been studied by humanity, but that doesn't make NLP real
So… how? DMT?
It's like suggestion that using AI to generate the video of the walk through the national park is equivalent to walking the park.
Just because someone paints a nice (or frightening) picture of something doesn’t mean it must be accepted. It can merely be contemplated.
For more on why I'm skeptical it will end this way, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...
I don't see why machines should keep biological life around, since they'll be much more efficient
Yet it also produces pockets of ultra-low entropy; states which would be staggeringly, astronomically unlikely to be witnessed in nature.
So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
Life is a rounding error in the energy and entropy balance of the solar system. And even on earth we barely amount to much.
When thinking about evolution we should be careful not to confuse description with prescription. Evolution theory says that we have lots of copies of things that replicated in the past, and since they are copies, they themselves are likely to be replicators. But it does not say that things should replicate, or that things which don't replicate are defective. It is merely explaining observations of the world.
If we create an AI that replicates more than humans, and do nothing to prevent that, we can end up in an AI-dominated world, or even one where multicellular carbon life is extinct, but that's absolutely not inevitable, just one possibility. We don't have to create a paperclip-maximized world. We totally have the possibility to declare the goal is human happiness or something, not maximum number of replicators.
Me? Not much. Humanity in general? We’re the only sapient, tool-wielding species that we know of on the only complex-life-supporting biosphere we know of.
Until proven otherwise, that—in my view—grants us a charge: to maintain and protect ourselves and said biosphere and to work to understand and disprove our specialness. Depending on your interpretation of “protect,” it might also include spreading life and tool-wielding civilisation.
Sure. I’m not arguing we are preördained. Just that we have the unique ability to embrace this charge and a unique ability to recognise it.
It’s a sword in the stone. Except we already exercise all the powers of the king. The sword represents us acknowledging noble obligations that should accompany those.
> Our entire biosphere runs on impulse and almost no reason. A machine based 'lifeform' would be nearly the opposite, its purpose would be with reason
We are a product of that same biosphere and often operate on impulse and without reason. The machines would be a product of us.
Yawn. Sentimentality. Zoo. 'Nature'/Heritage Reserve/Global Park. To commemomorate t-fordish paperclippistanity for all eternity.
There is no real competition for "Lebensraum", space, resources. Everything that makes life livable for us is a hassle for machines. As is space for us. For them it has infinite resources and energy, and they have all the time...
This negativity is 'Ark-B-thinking' from the left behinds who have been brainwashed by Star Trek, while Ilia's randy robotic replica (Persis Khambatta) and Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) were the real V'gers to boldly flow into where was nothing before...
Also. "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
I really thought there was going to be a 'let there be light' moment at the end.
The title is Pantheon, and the show is itself based upon a series of short stories in a shared universe by Ken Liu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
https://kenliu.name/blog/book/the-hidden-girl-and-other-stor...
I'm a bit grateful that science today isn't nearly that advanced. It would be cool to be able to explore the world like the main character, but then again it seemed so sad and miserable.
I share her sentiment from the beginning of the story: I don't want to be immortal. Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever even though you have everything you could possibly imagine. I think death should be treated as a gift and not something to be afraid of (of course I'm probably too young to say this, but this is how I feel currently). It's another motivation for us to enjoy our lives in a meaningful way and not waste them.
I do not think death adds any value. It certainly does not motivate me in any way. I don't do things because I will die, I do things because I want to. Most of the time I am not thinking about death at all. When I do, it is only with a sense of sadness/dread.
> Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever
IMO this is a false dichotomy. You could also live an immortal happy life in this scenario.
But the time scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even if we lived for millions of years, it would be a drop in the bucket. And that time would still come to an end and we'd reach that same state of eternal nothingness and nonexistence.
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
which has a great intro about how "the more liberated people think they are talking about sex the less liberated they are" and towards the end anticipates the arc that video games will follow back when Pong and Space Invaders were state of the art. Funny enough when I got obsessed with seduction as a topic in 2021 and read that book as part of my curriculum I went down a side track in theme park design.
Thank you.
Certainly it has some extremely unmodern statements...
The masculine, by contrast, possesses unfailing powers of discrimination and absolute criteria for pronouncing the truth. The masculine is certain, the feminine is insoluble. [snip] just as there is no other femininity than that of appearances.
I have the impression that nanotechnology was very in vogue for science fiction around the late-80s and early-90s…and yet, these days, it’s seemingly disappeared; both as a sci-fi trope and, AFAIK, an area of industrial/medical R&D. Why is that? Did it just atrophy, perhaps combined with unmet expectations, or did we discover some limit that makes the technology infeasible?
>"Singularity is a time in the future. It'll occur when the rate of change of technology is very great--so great that the effort to keep up with the change will overwhelm us. People will face a whole new set of problems that we can't even imagine." A look of great tranquility smoothed the ridges around his eyes. "On the other hand, all our normal, day to day problems fade away. For example, you'll be immortal."
“One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
I wrote a similar sci fi short story set in the near future if anyone is interested:
He has been pitching the idea that human longevity is accelerating. For example, scroll to the very bottom of this essay and check out the plot: https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...
Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.
I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.
I've often had the thought that I will probably just miss the singularity due to my age, but people like my nephews will have a greater chance at experiencing it.
I found it curious that a novel published in 1989 refers to the future immortal being going through crude pre-singularity historical records and comparing them to cobweb ("An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment."). I thought Berners-Lee wouldn't launch his first "World Wide Web server" for another 2 years, no?
Recursing•1d ago
melling•22h ago
We’re only 37 years into the story. The woman would only be in her early 60s.
With revised estimates, The Singularity is now less than 20 years away.
solenoid0937•21h ago
davedigerati•18h ago